The Genomics Core, under the direction of Dr. Jacob, will serve Projects by Cowley, Roman, and Greene in the genotyping of the congenic animals, sequencing, and providing bioinformatics support for all the Projects and Cores. This Core generates all wet lab genomic data related to genotyping the rats to generate the congenic and subcongenic animals using simple sequence length polymorphisms (SSLPs), generation of SSLP markers, cloning, sequencing, single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) detection and physical mapping (if needed). Dr. Jacob has extensive experience in all facets of this Core through his last 16 years of research. Dr. Jacob directs the Human and Molecular Genetics Center (HMGC) at the Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW). This center has in place all the personnel, equipment, robotics and laboratory information management systems required to meet the needs of this PPG. The genotyping component, highly automated, is set up to make early breeding decisions, which allows us to minimize the cost of rat housing. The Genomics Core will also direct many of the activities related to mutation detection and gene identification in Projects by Roman and Greene. Finally, gene hunting, high through-put sequencing and comparative genomics all require significant bioinformatics infrastructure. Dr. Jacob is the PI for the Rat Genome Database (RGD) and directs the Bioinformatics Program at MCW. As a result the analytical tools necessary for data analysis, gene identification and prediction, and gene expression analysis are all in place and operational.